Are You Honest Enough? Or Too Honest?

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Jo Hamlett, a 69-year-old retired cattle buyer in Mount Sterling, Iowa, was sick of hearing tall tales, so sick that this year, when he served as acting mayor of his town — population 54 — he proposed making lies illegal.

"The lying has just gotten worse," explains Hamlett. Sometimes it's locals exaggerating their fishing counts or hunting tallies or even "how much rain fell on their property last night." Then there are the out-of-towners, like the man who just the other day tried to tell Hamlett a whopper about his pet monkey. "This guy said he trained the monkey to climb a tree with a baseball bat and knock raccoons off the branches. A polished liar!"

News of Hamlett's proposal — which will probably be voted on in December by the Mount Sterling town council — has generated some snickers. But all monkey business aside, Hamlett's frustration is real. "I want to at least slow down the exaggerating," he says.

Most of us can feel his pain. Many Americans believe liars are everywhere. We don't trust our politicians (though that's not really new), doctors, lawyers, journalists, priests, car dealers, and especially stock analysts. There's plenty of cause for our suspicions: Once-respected businessmen are doing the perp walk in handcuffs. Speculation about what Martha Stewart knew, when she knew it, and what she did about it blanketed the television news this past summer, along with tsk-tsking over a disgraced New York Times reporter who admitted plagiarizing and embellishing huge chunks of his articles.

In our personal lives, we are so worried about being lied to that entrepreneurs are making money off our fears. Internet programs are now being sold to help us catch our husbands cheating on us on the Internet; other software has been crafted to snare teens who download term papers. In London, a major department store marketed home lie-detector tests — much simpler than the pulse-rate and sweat-checking systems used by police — around Christmastime.

They sold pretty well.
A few experts wonder whether things are really that much worse than they were in generations past — or if there's just more noise about it. For one thing, "the press was not as vigilant in earlier times," says Robert P. Lawry, a professor of law and director of the Center for Professional Ethics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. When modern-day megaliars are caught, their transgressions are analyzed in the glare of the media.

Others believe that our society's obsession with financial success has had a chilling effect on truth telling. "This enormous pressure to make money promotes dishonesty," says Charles Ford, M.D., a psychiatrist who teaches at the University of Alabama School of Medicine, in Birmingham.

Still, what about all the ordinary folks who lie when there is no financial motive? In one fascinating study, subjects lied when there was nothing at stake at all. Robert Feldman, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, invited dozens of pairs of unacquainted people into his lab to chat with each other, videotaped the results, then asked his subjects to watch the tapes and let him know each time a lie was told. Feldman's conclusion: "We found that people tell an average of two or three lies in ten minutes of conversation."

The subjects in Feldman's study were not pathological liars or even desperate-to-please neurotics. They were people who seemed to gild the lily without thinking about it, as so many of us do. "In theory, if everyone were honest all the time, it would probably be a good thing," says Feldman, "but the reality is, it is very hard to live that way. At the very least, there are the lies of omission that grease the wheels of social interaction. If you were 100 percent honest all the time, it would be hard to keep friends, to get and keep a job, or to form relationships."

Truth and consequences
Besides, fibbing — as opposed to large-scale lying — is often easy to get away with. Maureen O'Sullivan, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of San Francisco, conducts research on deception. For centuries, O'Sullivan explains, man- and womankind lived in relatively small groups. They could read one another's nonverbal — not to mention verbal — clues quite easily. "But now," she says, "as cities have gotten huge and social life has gotten anonymous, we can't tell if strangers are lying. We don't have good cheater detection."

As I researched this story, I realized that by dint of personality and lifestyle, I ought to be quite a liar. I live in a large city, among millions of strangers, far, far away from where I was brought up. Moreover, I won't deny a certain obsession with success as well as with a pressure to achieve, as measured by my bank statement.

Despite this, I am — I think — pretty honest. It might be more a matter of skill than of morality. I'm simply not a good liar. I blush easily, and I'm not a very deft storyteller in person, which is why I hide behind the pen. The times in my life when I've tried to tell big lies, I've been caught red-faced, and the memories of those humiliations have deterred most future attempts. The few occasions when I did get away with a big fat lie, I carried around a queasy, dirty feeling for years.

But I try to imagine a life completely without lies, and I see a cold, solitary place. Righteous maybe, but harsh, unamusing, and friendless too.

Fed up with lying though he is, even Jo Hamlett isn't sure how to put a stop to it in his small Iowa town. Who would separate truth from fiction? And what sorts of punishments would be meted out? Suggestions have ranged from tongue-lashing to mouth-washing. Recently, a more benign suggestion was put forth: Allow townspeople to buy coupons permitting one lie every weekend. It's all getting pretty complicated.

The truth is, as much as I dislike gross dishonesty, I'm afraid of the prospect of enforcing the truth 24/7. And despite our determination to smoke out the grand-scale liars, I suspect that most Americans feel the same way I do.